Articles About beyond village borders

While Democratic Governor Ted Strickland came out on the losing end of a tight statewide race, in Yellow Springs he was king, the choice of nine out of 10 local voters. Unfortunately for Strickland, the state did not follow the lead of the village.

When Doug Snyder and Bob Thompson recorded Daily Dance in 1972, nobody could have guessed that the album would be released for a third time in 2010. However, that’s exactly what happened when Cantor Records released the LP last December.

Local nurse midwife Cindy Farley had provided medical care in underdeveloped countries before. So when she agreed to go to Haiti for a week at the end of March, she thought she was well prepared for the job.

As a filmmaker who has experienced some success and some challenges, Joanne Caputo has occasionally asked herself the question, “Am I an artist?” It’s perhaps a feeling she shares with her nephew, John Caputo, who is the focus of her latest documentary. As a prisoner for 11 years at the Graterford and Harrisburg penitentiaries in Pennsylvania, John Caputo would say that art in some ways saved him. But in making a life after his release, he wonders if he is truly an artist or simply an ex-con who makes art.

What happens when Yellow Springs High School students are challenged to spin a new yarn from urban legends and fairy tales? The result, according to organizers of a regional high school playwriting challenge, is vivid characters that dare to leap out of insightful and witty scripts up and onto the stage.

Before the earthquake, Haiti was a country that struggled to support human life. Haiti was already the poorest country in the Americas by most standards; 80 percent of the people lived in poverty and many of those were malnourished or infected with AIDS or other diseases. And in the capital city of Port-au-Prince, about 400,000 people lived in the squalor of a lowland trash dump besieged with standing water, through which rag-clad children would dig for their daily sustenance.

From the middle of a field, the land looks different than the view from the road. Seen from the land owner’s perspective, the way the growers see it, one can just begin to understand what the birds and foxes see — open space without borders. That is also perhaps the way that painters and poets see the land when they articulate why it is so loved and valued.

Schools across the country have been reeling from state funding cuts sparked by the recession, and things are no different in Ohio. And in Yellow Springs, where school income tax receipts are forecasted to drop 30 percent this year, school leaders are grappling with ways to address the shortfall.

The glass jar of Mardi Gras beads that sits on David Fleming’s living room shelf reminds him of the city in which he was born, raised and expected to live out his years. But among the many things that Hurricane Katrina upended were Fleming’s plans for his life.

The job of an automobile assembly line worker is to assemble one particular part over and over and over again on each vehicle that comes down the line, GM employee Kim Clay explains in the film. On the day the Moraine plant closed in December 2008, when the last truck came down the line, workers no longer had a job to do, he says — they no longer had a purpose. He felt it, others felt it. And Louis Carter, who applied the sticker with the last serial number on it, especially felt it.